Public Policy is social agreement written down as a universal guide for social action. We at The Policy ThinkShop share information so others can think and act in the best possible understanding of "The Public Interest."

American immigration enforcement is necessary. It’s goals and means at the present time may need reforming though.

Fueled by fear and political opportunity in the aftermath of the post 911 decade, this policy went into full force in 2010, despite the fact that so called “illegal immigration” had significantly tapered off. The Obama administration, nevertheless, went full force ahead with this policy to appease popular fears and to give a sense of being tough on crime and of being pro national security. It is clear that the affect of the current immigration policy is disproportionately falling on the Latino immigrants. It is also labeling them criminals. THIS POLICY MOST BE REASSESSED… In light of the hardships that illegal immigration causes for men and families running away from political, economic stress or toward the pull of the American dream, and the problems that it causes for an America whose labor markets have been themselves greatly stressed by the long, deep and lingering national recession, perhaps we need to take a good long look at how America is investing in its labor force and how it might better integrate and recruit needed talent from its neighbors to the south. America will continue to age at an alarming baby boomer pace, by the time we hear all the reports of the “unintended consequences” of the current skewed immigration policy it may be too late.

The report fails to mention the nearly 12 million people who are not in the country legally. According to the report only a fraction of this number (368,644) were removed, or deported, from our country. The report fails to discuss the apparent problem that this policy is disproportionately affecting Hispanic immigrants. For example, according to the PEW Foundation’s Hispanic Center:

People from Asia, for example, are underrepresented in the ICE immigration dragnet. The connection to immigration from the Eastern European former soviet block and Russian gangs, for example, is also missing from the national security report. Although we should not paint former Soviet block countries with a broad brush, the absence of many other groups from the demographics of this dragnet needs closer examination.

According to the most recent U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) report, the principle investigative arm of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), “ICE has prioritized its limited resources on the identification and removal of criminal aliens and those apprehended at the border while attempting to unlawfully enter the United States.”

The data provided by ICE shows that most of the immigrants being affected by this policy are involved with the criminal justice system or are coming across our southern border from a handful of Latin American countries (see table 1 below). Coming across the border without appropriate immigration paperwork is itself a violation of our national laws.

“In executing these responsibilities, ICE has prioritized its limited resources on the identification and removal of criminal aliens and those apprehended at the border while attempting to unlawfully enter the United States. This report provides an overview of ICE Fiscal Year (FY) 2013 civil immigration enforcement and removal operations:

In FY 2013:

ICE conducted a total of 368,644 removals.

ICE conducted 133,551 removals of individuals apprehended in the interior of the U.S.

82 percent of all interior removals had been previously convicted of a crime.

ICE conducted 235,093 removals of individuals apprehended along our borders while attempting to unlawfully enter the U.S. 1

59 percent of all ICE removals, a total of 216,810, had been previously convicted of a crime.

ICE apprehended and removed 110,115 criminals removed from the interior of the U.S.

ICE removed 106,695 criminals apprehended at the border while attempting to unlawfully enter the U.S.

98 percent of all ICE FY 2013 removals, a total of 360,313, met one or more of ICE’s stated civil immigration enforcement priorities. 2

Of the 151,834 removals of individuals without a criminal conviction, 84 percent, or 128,398, were apprehended at the border while attempting to unlawfully enter the U.S. and 95 percent fell within one of ICE’s stated immigration enforcement priorities. 3

The leading countries of origin for those removed were Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador.”

Too often, American public policy discussions are framed in single issue debates of pros and cons which make for great media theater and water cooler conversation–but never end in solutions… only in winners and losers. To be sure, the real losers are once again the shrinking middle-class which continues to see a broken Congress continue to destroy the country. An American dream Hollywood built and the middle-class made sustainable by working itself out of the working class and buying into the popular media illusion. This “progress” now seems out of reach for much of the children of that middle-class and for recent immigrants. So where is America going? What will happen to an America where honest and bipartisan discussion of real public policy problems is muffled by cable show sensationalism and campaign politics? Can we do better?

Immigration is not only about people staying in America without a proper visa or citizen status; it is also about the American continent and the millions of people that have called it home for well over a thousand years. From the perspective of native Americans the question is: Who is the illegal immigrant, pilgrim? This includes millions of modern day South of the border Latinos whose ancestors have roamed across the Rio Grande for thousands of years. From the perspective of the Eurocentric 1st, 2nd or 3rd generation American the clamor is: Go back to where you came from; you are not a real American. As America fails to sustain a middle-class and integrate new immigrants it dies a thousand deaths one broken dream at a time. Mortgage foreclosures, drug abuse, urban decay, and dead end jobs that cannot pay for healthcare or sustain a family are but a few of the pervasive signs that America is not only divided but headed in the wrong direction.

Complex public policy issues are never about one variable, one social or economic dynamic or simple yes or no choices. Today’s media industry continually portrays a false choice in a tug of war between one dimensional unilateral actions to protect the perceived interests of one side against those of another. In reality, public policy issues are characterized by complex social and economic dynamics that impact many publics and present several choices in terms of:

acting or not acting,

who (government or the philanthropic sector, for example) should act,

who should pay and

how much it will all cost.

The outcome of those choices and the quality of that debate ultimately impacts the cultural and economic health of the country.

American is killing its life source–IMMIGRANTS. As such, it is killing itself. For this we can all agree President Obama has failed to lead in this most important of public policy problems.

“AS A presidential candidate in 2008, Barack Obama promised to enact immigration reform during his first year in office. Although his party controlled both arms of Congress for the next two years, he barely tried. Instead, he has presided over the greatest mass deportation in American history. As our chart shows, he has tossed far more Mexicans and other illegal immigrants out of the country than his predecessors—nearly 2m so far. Spending on border security is now greater than on all other types of federal criminal-law enforcement combined. Since migrants bring youth, energy and enterprise, this is an expensive way of making America less dynamic (as our leader this week explains). And the human costs are immense (read our story here). Families are torn apart; lives ruined. Yet many House Republicans still insist that they will not back immigration reform because they cannot trust President Obama to defend the border.”

Gabriel Sherman, of NYTs fame, opens a historical window into a media pundit, cold war warrior, and “American Patriot” world that is as old school as it is apocalyptic. Sherman paints a modern panorama depicting a dying small town romantic vision of a segregated America juxtaposed against a more sober vision of a burgeoning diverse America made real by a sitting African American president. It does a good job of documenting an ideologically tight nit network of pundits, patriots and profiteers on a messianic mission to save America with roots in the Nixonian backlash to the new Federalism and the baby booming sixties.

This book can be seen as an honest attempt to shed journalistic light on the Nixonian heritage of a conservative movement that in its attempt to garner popular votes by winning our “hearts and minds” –through the use of patriotic smoke and ideological mirrors–gives us a romantic portrayal of wedge issues that get our attention and get some to vote. It paints the Fox network as an ideological war room and Roger Ailes as its Minister of Propaganda.

The book shows how the Sherman view, though unflattering, of Roger Ailes and his kin, can give needed perspective to the perhaps elitist and snobbish Northeast intellectual types’ myopic view which mistakenly portrays Fox and the right wing as “buffoons and rabid rednecks”. Instead of giving us a picture of Roger Ailes as a monster, Sherman, purposely or not, gives us a more balanced and human picture of a working class boy playing hard ball for an America he desperately believes in. This picture and our belief that Sherman’s investigative and editorial work is well vouched for, make it an important piece in our own repertoire for our mutual journey to understand an America that is mostly memory and an America that is contested by so called “patriots” some of us see as crazy.

After reading this book we may also get important insights into the so called “right wing fringe” who many don’t understand but we can now see, thanks to Sherman’s work, as crazy, like a Fox!

Perhaps more importantly the book can raise important questions about the role that modern cable news plays in the shaping of the American imagination and our political discourse.

Given today’s liberalization of news information, few bastions remain where one can sift through the cacophony of media bites and babble to form an educated

opinion or assess an educated risk. The Economist is failing in this regard on the American debate on healthcare reform–The Affordable Care Act.

Healthcare reform in America is a struggle for power and wealth at the increasingly small American top and a life and death struggle for most of the people below.

If we loose respected journals like the Economist in these times of mass information as intellectual fodder for the masses, we will be left without an intellectual meeting place where concerned minds can gather to contemplate benchmarks and directions. Regarding The Affordable Care Act debate in America, not only has the current president failed to sell and communicate the important of ACA implementation, he has once again betrayed the needs of the many for the expedient and self serving calculus of preserving power and status by appealing to an imaginary center–not too different here from the pragmatic Bill Clinton on Welfare Reform. But we digress.

The Economist has been a reliable source for decades as it has proven to be an \”objective\” source of information on the complex world stage. It\’s recent coverage of the American scene, however, requires vision and focus if it is going to support the journal\’s reputation as one of the few sources that our college professors respected that were not refereed journals.

The headline of the above story, \”The Obamacare sofware mess,\” is as semantically charged as it is irrelevant to any of the public policy issues raised by a serious American healthcare market debate addressing the important issue of how healthcare is distributed, facilitated or accessed by people in need of healthcare services.

Semantics: The term \”Obamacare\” plays directly into the divisive and charged narrative that portrays the healthcare debate in America as a tug of war between an \”evil and un-American\” president and American freedom. The framing of the current full court press, by conservatives, to obstruct the American president, at all at all costs, and the popular will of a democracy, is akin to saying that Churchill failed to stop Hitler sooner or to foresee the costs of settling with Stalin because of his neonatally determined speech impediment. It is academically irresponsible and intellectually dishonest, at least on the pages of this fine journal, to stain this usually intellectually rigorous space with narratives that are more appropriate in pop news sources that entertain people who are looking to reinforce their own deeply held biases and/or myopic political world views.

The Economics has been a leading world source of factual information relevant to the business of serious policy discourse and sober business leadership.

The foregoing comments are submitted on behalf of the Policy ThinkShop blogging team.

As a not for profit, non partisan source of policy analysis and conversation, we rely heavily on sources like the Economist to promote reason and thoughtful

conversation on all things public policy….

Please reconsider your use of the American public policy discourse and reflect on your use of language to add to and further support our current cacophony of obstructionism and self promoting pragmatism in the pursuit of popular power and further public policy noise…

When it comes to government having access to “Big Data” the mistakes, however small or innocent, can be quite large.

Perhaps we are a bit naive as Americans when we assume that government is not watching a great deal of what we do or say over “public” airways, etc. It just stands to reason that if it is going out over “the air” that somehow, interested parties are going to be able to get their hands on it, That may include foreign governments spying on us, local rebels like Anonymous, and, perhaps more thoroughly and often, our government’s amazing information gathering apparatus linked to places like the NSA.

But as Americans, naive or cynical, we should be able to question and contemplate the possibilities of Big Data in the hands of Big Government.

“What does the National Security Agency consider a small or a big number? The Washington Post’s Barton Gellman has a report based on documents the paper got from Edward Snowden about an N.S.A. audit that found two thousand seven hundred and seventy-six “incidents” in 2012 in which it broke its own rules about spying on Americans, either accidentally or on purpose. That is seven times a day, which sounds less like a slip than a ritual. But to call those violations frequent, according to the agency, would be to misunderstand the scale of its operations: “You can look at it as a percentage of our total activity that occurs each day,” a senior N.S.A. official told the paper. “You look at a number in absolute terms that looks big, and when you look at it in relative terms, it looks a little different.” We spy so much that the math gets hard; even thousands of privacy and legal violations can’t really be held against us.”

After years of the seemingly inadvertent fomentation of distrust among its polity (the growing role of the U.S. government and the Vietnam war, for example), technology has opened up a potentially ubiquitous eavesdropping by the federal government that is eerily reminiscent of George Orwell’s 1984. It does not seem sinister, though, since it thus far appears to be the outcome of an aggressive privatization policy that was probably compelled by the rapid implementation of our most recent wars. Nevertheless, Americans have the right to ask question, remain vigilant and demand answers if not reform.

“A majority of Americans – 56% – say that federal courts fail to provide adequate limits on the telephone and internet data the government is collecting as part of its anti-terrorism efforts. An even larger percentage (70%) believes that the government uses this data for purposes other than investigating terrorism.

And despite the insistence by the president and other senior officials that only “metadata,” such as phone numbers and email addresses, is being collected, 63% think the government is also gathering information about the content of communications – with 27% believing the government has listened to or read their phone calls and emails.”

We never think of ourselves as strangers, but others around us at one time or another surely will. For thousands of years groups of human beings have found ways to bond and build unity. Unfortunately, at the same time that we form the “we,” the “them” or the “other” is automatically formed. That is the fundamental basis of discrimination, judgement, bias and, yes, racism. It’s us against them. It’s “you and I are not the same and I don’t trust you.”

On that unfortunate night when George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin met face to face, they both saw a stranger. George Zimmerman had already been armed and ready for “the stranger” and acted accordingly when he encountered a startled Trayvon Martin. Not much can really be said about that night because the only real witness was not a witness at all but a participant observer overwhelmed by his own fear, anger and pursuit of “the stranger in the night.”

Racism is but a word and concept that when put to the test of thought and reason falls short of describing the totality and complexity of many of the situations it, perhaps ironically, so often is a vital part of. Racism as an explanatory concept falls short because outside of “the human race” all the other constructs relating to race do not hold up to scientific scrutiny. There is only one kind of human being, though we are all quite different. Historically those differences have divided us and caused some of us to treat other people in inhumane ways. The construct of “White person” has been used historically to bring together a normally disparate collection of people. The early KKK included a diversity of people from different religions and ethnicities. This collection of disparate people were united in their apposition to the empowerment and liberation of antebellum South people–African Americans who had been enslaved because they were brought to America as muscle for work and were labeled, legally, as somewhere between animal and human. There is much psychosis and ill will in the history of the American Republic and as inheritors of that legacy, White people (however one defines the complex category) must live with that history. Black people must also live with that burden as victims and objects of hostility. As Americans, we all have a responsibility to address that past and to make sure that it does not dominate our present or future. There is no more important a challenge for the future of this Republic. America cannot go on closing its doors and incarcerating people who do not fit an antiquated norm.

America must work on reinventing itself and forging a culture that will better define what it expects from its citizens and one that is more attentive and inclusive of what it needs from the future than what it needs from its past. America must be more forward looking and embracing of people’s differences. That will not be easy… but it must happen. It cannot be done piecemeal through divisive movements and competition… Stakeholders in a future multicultural America must forge a value system that can be taught at home by parents, in school by teachers, at religious gatherings by spiritual leaders and in corporate America by managers. America increasingly looks different and we must figure out how to make the differences among us work if we are going to stay competitive in a competitive world.

Can America talk its way out of the race problem?

In important ways, racism speaks to the fears and phobias held deeply by people who fear black people, especially men America labels “black.” The reasons White people fear them may be debatable, but their discomfort with “the black stranger” cannot be explained away.

George Zimmerman was afraid and emotional enough that night, that he could not simply say: Good evening. What is your name? I am the neighborhood watch guy and I do not know you? Can we talk? Perhaps he could have said something like that and a simple conversation could have unraveled. Perhaps avoiding the confrontation that ensued.

When a person feels strong and negative feelings about another person, because they are strange and foreign to them, it is understandable. But when a person feels these feelings about a person who is black or African American, that person is acting on prior perceptions and images that are a part of American history and we, as a Nation, hardly know how to talk about that.

To be sure, the “we” here is those of us who frame these issues purely as racial, with little attention to the complexities that lead to intergroup mistrust and hostilities between so called “ethnic” or “racial” groups and the mainstream which is still presumed to be “White.”

But history is not simply Black and White. America is still not able to get over its “Black and White psychosis.” The mainstream American hegemonic culture has not processed differences and cultural conflicts between groups very well. That is the most deleterious outcome of its psychosis. Although White and Black hostilities are well documented and talked about, the lynching of Native Americans and Mexican Americans that went on in the mid and southwestern states is rarely mentioned. American consciousness and history is so twisted that today Hollywood portrays yesterday’s predominantly “brown” cowboys in the erroneous image of blond haired and blue eyed John Wayne. Intergroup competition, mistrust, hatred and violence are as old as the New England witch hunts, Southern White terror and abuse and exploitation of immigrants to America.

But intergroup competition and mistrust, intergroup hostilities in the face of reason and laws is not new. What is new is the proliferation of guns in our country–both urban and suburban, legal and illegal. Mistrust and divisions between groups that increasingly fuel and dominate our electoral politics and discourse do not bode well for an America that is already on guard about teenagers shooting up our schools and theaters, disgruntled and unstable young people blowing up Federal Buildings in Oklahoma, and homeland terrorism born of immigrants from anticommunism wars that armed and trained religious minorities throughout Europe, Asia and the Middle East. History is very much with us and we are doomed to repeat it. The violence that ensued between George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin is very much embedded in racial history and mistrust. Mistakes happen, but guns have to be carrier by choice and how we define and treat one another in any situation has roots in how we were brought up and how “the other” looks and “feels” to us.

Hope lies in the hearts and minds of today’s young. But it will not survive for long if we allow police departments, States like Florida and the media establishment to make the mistakes and the politically motivated laws that promote vigilantism and hostility between neighbors. For example, the stand your ground law apparently does. What kind of society have we become that we allow excessive use of violence no matter what? In a diverse society where so many of us treat one another as “the other” or “the stranger” we cannot afford laws and court systems that allow anyone to define another person, and based on how they define that person, feel fear for their lives and kill them. That is insane and that is what is wrong with the Florida court system today.

Something is terribly wrong in American justice today. On the one hand, there is this slavery and civil rights history that is somewhat alien to most of today’s young people (today’s young people, of any race or ethnicity) and is somewhat stuck in the past for the rest of us. Civil rights is no longer about black and white. The country is much different today and in important ways the current generation that will matter, in terms of what happens in the next quarter century (young people between the ages of 15 to 35) is up at bat.

What are young people on all sides and from all communities going to do to make the future America kinder and gentler? What ever happened to community and neighborhood?

People are all deserving of dignity and happiness. We live in a society that’s supposed to make it happen. Well…. happiness within reason. Perhaps Norman Rockwell’s four freedoms. Perhaps those four are not enough?

All men are created equal, it’s just that we have all not evolved equally. Hmmm… That’s a loaded statement. Let us clarify.

Women and men of voting age in our society have full citizenship rights. Which is to say, they theoretically have the right to understand and exercise their rights. However, we know that the plying field is not leveled and that we all have differing resources in our pockets, sort of speak. So even rights must be moved if you will with resources. If rights are theoretically equal the exercising of those rights is not.

America continues her journey in the pursuit of her nobility of values: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

For America, as a metaphorical entity, this makes perfect sense. But for a divided, fractured and haunted by racial, gender and economic diversity America, it is quite something else.

Noble values and pursuits aside, our American family is trying to get along and it is acting like a typical family–bickering, blaming, competing and demanding.

The difference here, though, is that yet another segment of our polity is claiming that it is alienated from the whole–that it needs legal remedies in order to ensure its proper place and, perhaps most importantly, the full exercise of its citizen status under our framework of laws and rights. “Our framework of laws and rights?” Indeed, if by “our” we do not mean the entire polity then it seems meaningless to say that we are one nation. And so it goes that our citizenry is divided because our laws, our economic way of life and our burgeoning diversity seem inadequate for a nation that clamors for more in the face of world recession, political division, perpetual war, a broken healthcare system, and a global security problem that threatens to let drones loose in our backyards… Hmmm…. wait a minute, it already has.

What is essentially a tax, health coverage and inheritance problem is now morphing into the next semantically charged issue that will mobilize the next electorate and shape our political future in ways that go well beyond civil rights issues here at home. But our house seems ever more divided and our ability to clamor for more “from a broken house” is akin to the lung filled screams of a baby, saying: “MAMA! I want more!” Perhaps naively groups form, put together leadership and a voice and clamor in the public square, the courts in this case, for their dignity and their dollars. Others have clamored, have achieved their screams in legal code and yet are left wanting… Yet here we go again–like The Who song goes…

“The U.S. Supreme Court has handed down two landmark same-sex marriage rulings, one striking down a major provision of the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) and the other leaving uncertain the fate of California’s Proposition 8, the 2008 ballot initiative that prohibits gay and lesbian couples in the state from …”

Contrary to popular belief America was not created by immigration. It was created by conquest and exploration and it was done so on top of many other “native” nations. To this day Americans have not been able to assimilate and fully include those natives into its polity or its economic success. How then can we argue that immigration has been so noble and that immigrants are naturally a part of the American way?The truth lies much closer to Plato’s “necessary untruths.” To romanticize immigration, both in terms of why people leave their native lands and in terms of why they come to America is simply false and misleading. People come to America because they hope for better than they have where they reside as they make the often courageous decision to uproot and venture into the relatively unknown. What never seems to be discussed is how few of us here in America consider leaving this country. In an important way, America was created by people leaving their homeland because they were pushed out by various political and economic factors. That is what we have in common with the new comers. They come here because it is not comfortable where they previously resided. Here then lies the central question that needs to be considered by all of us who want to be fair minded and responsible. What would have become of us and our ancestors if the then native “americans” would have had the wherewithal to keep our ancestors out? Just as many of us want to keep other people out today.

Technology is changing war but legal concepts and international law are not as mutable. As governments and leaders enthusiastically move forward with technological efficacy, the legal morass and moral quandary caused by social, psychological and economic destruction promises to create new problems that may haunt us for generations. But technology moves fast, corporate America knows how to package and sell it, and the American public is the last to weigh in. Democracy is increasingly purchased in the ongoing divided American electorate and the internecine warfare election politics now represent. Like the proverbial Pyrrhic victory, we crush and pick off our enemies as the facts of our deeds slowly leek out and we potentially stand in ubiquitous and unforgiving popular judgement at home and abroad.

We seem to be getting farther and farther away from “though shall not kill” and “violence begets violence”

At last we have a technological equivalent to hackers threatening social and economic information exchange where the government is “anonymous” and civilization itself is the victim. It is legion, expect it…

“WHEN it comes to lethal drone strikes against foreign targets, America’s government and Congress should be aware that “what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander”, says …”

Educational attainment, the schools we attend, the neighborhoods we grow up in, and the family that shapes us, all represent the context which gives our language meaning, its connotations. But the dictionary and the official meanings in it is an important shared frame of reference; or is it? In search of meaning, intentions and aggression, we often find ourselves in front of the proverbial mirror of shame. There always seems to be plenty of blame to go around when people are mean to one another. But to complain about UFC culture seems to go beyond reason to a place where words or meaning may no longer hold much substance.

Life in today’s diverse America is becoming quite interesting and the language to explain it increasingly seems to fall short. Public behavior, especially public behavior tied to corporate profits and corporate values, has ramifications beyond colloquialisms and local vernacular. Because the spoken word is usually magnified and made more powerful when it is repeated by those who have the means, people who speak to the wrong person (s) or in the wrong place, or at the wrong time, get crucified. Someone is always ready to listen and to register a complain for all the good people to weigh in and render a collective judgement. What passes for conversation, if inelegant or far from eloquent, in the confines of comrades and buddies in local corners or man caves, can be quite the consternation in a public setting–even when it is said in a spectacle of violence, and mostly indecency, displayed for the public palate. Apparently it is ok to beat another human being nearly to death but it is not okay to call them names? What ever happened to sticks and stones will break my bones, etc., etc. etc. We have reached the day when the tongue is mightier than the sword and the public sense of decency is measured by what Oscar Wilde himself may have seen as ironic and inane.

Tell us here at The Policy ThinkShop what you THINK???

“UFC fighter Nate Diaz (above) was suspended by the mixed martial arts body on Thursday night for earlier in the week using a gay slur against another fighter. That’s typically where a manager or someone else would step in and get the athlete to apologize and …”

Imagine that you live in a bubble and there is only one radio in that bubble which filters all the news and distributes it in the bubble via many mediums and makes it look and sound like many truths–necessary untruths. Rolling Stone magazine has a very interesting take on the recent media frenzy over American raised terror.

As far back as the times of Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, and Tamerlane (Timur), ruthless conquerors have struck fear in the hearts of their conquest targets and their progeny. Much of what passes for news analysis these days is well anointed by ideological and psychological overtones that not be grounded in fact or circumstance. The Policy ThinkShop team invites you to visit the following link to explore a sobering argument addressing recent media handling of the Boston Marathon tragedy and the reasons behind the bombing perpetrators …

In seemingly endless times of “trash talk” that led to an improbable and unpopular political victory, the newly minted president clamors: “Now arrives the hour of action.” Fleeting relief comes to the nation as the transition […]

The ThinkShop promotes connections to all forms of social media to bring you resources beyond what you’ll find in your daily routine…

Take a "Brain Break" and visit this "fun link" by clicking this image now...

Break for Fun… click video below or have more fun by clicking the pic above…

Policy ThinkShop: Relax, we did the research for you…

Welcome to Policy ABC's ThinkShop, where getting news and public policy analysis is as easy as "A B C."

"The Policy ThinkShop team works hard researching the latests and most interesting news and reports. The resulting links will point you to the original sources so that you can spend as little time as possible getting the most news possible."

Public Policy and Culture

Policy ThinkShop Resources

Our experts do the searching and serve up the best resources to help you stay on top of key public policy issues.

Featured Twitter Friend: Health Literacy ABCs

Health Literacy

Twitter Friend: MigrationPundit

Policy ThinkShop: “THINK TOGETHER”

"Policy is codified knowledge that stands as a universal guide for social action. Public policy is shaped by those who know and who act on that knowledge. We at The Policy ThinkShop share information so others can think and act in the best possible understanding of "The Public Interest."